Hey all – I'm a software engineer and have recently been wanting to do more on the hardware side. I went down the pcb rabbit hole and created a board, now I'm working on a rev2 of it and would love some eyes/opinions on my set up. Link below is the project in EasyEDA - thanks all!
- You don't have the ability to put a heatsink on your 6V voltage regulator, which may or may not be required (certainly required if you're expecting ~2A at 6V for servos! Unless you're actually using a switchmode BEC or similar.)
- Your traces and vias are very small. While it's somewhat controversial, I like to use larger traces whenever possible, if only for physical robustness.
- Similarly, you have traces that are very close together, or very close to vias. I am especially concerned about the (lack of) space between the mounting holes (GND) and the 6V power trace.
- 330 ohms as a current limiting resistor for modern LEDs is quite small, unless you want them as bright as possible. I use 1k resistors on most of my boards, and it's plenty bright for indicators.
- I would put extra pads connected to each of your "unused" pins, to make it easier to add functionality later.
@westfw thanks for taking the time, really appreciate it. The servos are micro and should only pull 750ma? I was planning for the 2A just to have some wiggle room. Too much? Great callout on the traces, I have a design rule to make vcc, 5v, 6v, and gnd thicker, but I think you're right to beef them up a bit more. Same for trace clearance, I think I can tweak the autorouter settings to give more space. Good callout about 330ohm, going to switch to 1k for my onboard leds. That's a great idea about adding pads for unused pins, something always comes up after!
Typically autorouters will put things as close together as the design rules permit. You can change the settings and it will be better, but I tend to find it much more useful to take the basic autorouter output and manually move the traces that I don't like...
thanks westfw! I modified the autoroute settings and am seeing better results. Going to adjust them manually now.
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